Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity...Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. Pope Benedict XVI

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Lizard Brains

I was at a seminar about parenting children with Downs Syndrome. It was taught by a psychologist. Lots of great information. At one point she was talking about out brains. That we have one section of the brain that controls our fight/flight/freeze type response. It kicks in when we experience stress. She called that the lizard brain. Then there is the other part of the brain where we have reason and logic and language. Now the tendency modern people have is to think good brain/bad brain. Logic is good. Emotion is bad. Right?She didn't go there. She encouraged us to learn how to connect the two parts of the brain to apply the wisdom of the left brain to the emotional issues of the right brain. I am sure there is nothing inherently wrong with the lizard brain. That is why I don't like the name much. Yet why do I know that? It is rooted in creation. God made us and would not give us such a powerful part of our brain if it did not serve some important function. Certainly many religious conversions come from the lizard brain. Atheists scoff at those. People making a decision to follow Jesus based on an emotional crisis. They would be much better off being purely rational. Would we really? I wonder what a purely rational humanity would look like. Emotions are indicators of a deeper reality. It is a reality that the modern mind looks down on but that is where we find the deepest truth about ourselves.I know the lizard brain is good based on my faith. How can one know it based on logic and science? I don't see how. It appears that there is much time and energy wasted in dealing with people hurting each other's feelings. What is the payoff? We don't need the fight/flight/freeze thing nearly as much as we used to. Physically we are pretty safe. Could we not assess risk better using reason? When you don't start with the belief that creation is good but fallen then you can arrive at many different places. You can start to hate a part of yourself. If we are just products of evolution then there is no reason to think parts of us are just not helpful in today's society. We might have outgrown our emotions.I think that is a big part of why people who are emotionally hurt often feel the need to talk to someone who has been hurt in the same way. They feel the question in society of why don't you just get over it? It is a question based in pure logic. Why should you let a bad childhood or a traumatic experience ruin your life? It is hard to explain that to someone looking for a rational answer. Sometimes it is hard for such people to explain it to themselves. That is unfortunate because to some extent or other we are all being influenced by deep emotional forces we don't completely understand. That is rooted in our blindness to the spiritual. Many of our deepest emotional needs mirror spiritual realities. We want authentic sexual intimacy because God is love and we want to be like God. We want good human fathers and mothers because we need to be children of God. We hate violence because we know we are meant to live in peace. If we see these lizard brain longings not as accidents of evolution but as desires for something more then we can love that side of us.Psychology still gets that but does not admit it gets it from the Christian assumptions embedded in society. We see that being questioned more and more and science cannot arrive at the same conclusions. Science can only say what is and not what should be. So modern psychology has the tendency to assume what is for the majority of humans is what should be. That is they are losing their awareness of our fallen nature. Our hearts desire perfect parents and perfect lovers and perfect peace. In short our hearts desire God. The more psychology loses sight of that the less valuable it will be.

About Me

I am a Catholic. A convert from a reformed protestant tradition. Trying to understand Catholicism and help others understand it. I am a father of 6 children from college age down to a kindergartener. I work as a computer systems analyst.